Politifact Agrees: Rightwing Pundits = Liar Liar Pants on Fire
Republican partisan pundits like Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh are almost 6 times more likely to garner the coveted Politifact “Pants on Fire” rating than left leaning pundits. However, among party leaders, the poor Republicans are only about 4 times more likely than Democrats to be rated as “Pants on Fire”.
As Libertarian blogger Ed Brayton comments:
One of Andrew Sullivan’s readers compiled the data on Politifact’s findings on most of the leading Republican and Democratic leaders and media pundits, as well as President Obama and Mitt Romney, and found that the Republicans are dishonest — especially highly dishonest — significantly more often than Democrats.
Politifact offers six categories for claims made by politicians and pundits: true, mostly true, half true, mostly false, false and pants on fire. By nearly every measure, Republicans are found to be considerably more likely to be distorting the facts with their statements. Among all party leaders rated (Romney, Boehner, Mitch McConnell, Gingrich, Perry and Santorum for Republicans; Obama, Biden, Reid, Pelosi, and Hillary Clinton for the Democrats), the Republicans are more than 4 times more likely to be rated ‘pants on fire’ (and that isn’t even including Michele Bachmann, who averages about one such statement per day). Democrats are higher on all the true-ish categories and lower on all the false-ish categories.